The Gulf Coast Blog

Craft • Culture • News

Craft • Culture • News

Christine Ha

A one-act play I wrote last semester under the tutelage of Mark Medoff was recently read onstage at the University of Houston's Wortham Theater. While primarily a fiction writer, I found playwriting to be an exercise in creating powerful scenes, scenes…

Becca Wadlinger

If you happen to live around the Houston area, we hope to see you at the fourth annual Houston Indie Book Fest this Saturday (April 2nd) outside the Menil Collection. The book fair starts at 11 a.m. and continues until 5 p.m. There will be live music,…

Thea Lim

Last week, the internet took a break from the civil war in Libya and the impending nuclear meltdown in Japan to hate on a tween. In case you were doing something important and missed the kerbloffle,1 Rebecca Black is a chirpy thirteen year-old Justin…

Laura Eve Engel

As someone who does some musical arranging but no original songwriting to speak of, I've been thinking a little bit lately about the weird, interstitial territory of the cover song. Sure, we're all active readers and writers, and on our better days we're…

Elizabeth Lyons

½Then the Midwest. I have always loved
the loneliness of those midsized cities
strewn along the plains, in them it seems to me my heart would at last be that open field where an entirely new love could snow. -Matthew Zapruder, "Dobby's Sweatshirt" I wonder…

Samuel Amadon

When we think of Ronald Johnson, we probably think of his erasure Radi os or of his long poem ARK--which is in desperate need of a reissue--but he was also the author of several excellent cookbooks: The Aficionado's Southwestern Cooking--the most comprehensive…

Polina Slavcheva

"For the female spectator there is a certain over-presence of the image - she is the image."
¶Mary Ann Doane in "Film and the Masquerade" I recently saw Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, which had many scenes of sexual and psychological violence. For many of you,…

Sophie Klahr

Eavesdropping on my parents during a visit to Pittsburgh this winter, I became certain that I'd been born into an environment where becoming a writer or language-invested artist of some type was inevitable. I wasn't eavesdropping deliberately; my parent's…

Aja Gabel

I did something kind of crazy last month. I ran a marathon, my first. I know most runners like to say how incredible it feels to run a marathon, to push your body beyond your known limits, to test your mental capacity, to complete a goal often worked…